by Perry Glasser
English Department

Perry Glasser

Conversations about the nature and value of the liberal arts grow shrill because the poles of the conversation encompass no middle ground. When no compromise is possible, collaboration is difficult. The best an academic community can hope for is uneasy mutual tolerance. Alas, when money is scarce, tolerance vanishes.

The Traditionalist Camp believes itself Gibraltars, rocks of eternal truth soaring implacably above a sea of perilous change, guardians of a civilization. The Practicality Camp champions Progress and denies the relevance of the parasitic eggheads in the Ivory Tower who enjoy short hours and long summers while collecting inflated salaries to educate youth to penury.

Two generations ago, when the GI Bill transformed higher education from a way-station for the children of the rich to a means to democratize the American Dream, the debate has prattled on with little consequence. To keep the peace, colleges and universities long ago created organizational silos, hired separate administrations, constructed separate buildings, and simply kept apart people who did not play well together. Many institutions simply dedicated themselves to one camp or the other and neatly sidestepped the entire issue.

As long as the money held out, it worked.

But when a weak economy makes funding anemic, the liberal arts are deemed an expensive luxury. At campuses where peaceful coexistence was once the norm, the conversations have become blood sport. Livelihoods are on the line. In academe, gripe sessions are held over vile coffee, letter writing campaigns are organized, demonstrations with message-bearing placards are plotted; in the legislature, meetings are held in tattered offices where the coffee is equally vile and every decision is weighed for its net impact on the shrinking budget and the next election. Tenure? Shall we tell just-laid-off voters that we require more taxes to guarantee employment for life at jobs that that end in May and resume in September? Exactly how many professors vote?

Education needs a Third Camp, a place where competing visions of purpose become one. The Third Camp is a place where everyone—society, educators, and students— wins. We require a new, shared vision of the purpose of the liberal arts.

But first, we need to abandon the old visions.

The Traditionalist Camp

The liberal arts have no intrinsic value. Neither does anything else. Whether we are talking about labor, real estate, a used automobile, or a June 1937 Action Comics first featuring Superman sold at auction for $317,200, value is determined by transaction.

Any attempt to champion the liberal arts by assigning intrinsic value devolves to a mythopoeic argument. Like religion, assigning valuation to highly developed critical skills and broad general knowledge requires a leap of faith: A transaction will arise at which those liberal arts skills will be valued.

But what’s the evidence for such value? How, when, and where will these skills come into play? An accountant can prepare taxes and perhaps obtain a refund, but a liberal arts major will discuss the fairness of tax policy, the history of tax policy, the philosophy of tax policy—all engrossing conversations, but none of which pays for groceries.

As educators in the Traditionalist Camp, we tell our students, “Embrace the liberal arts: your life and soul will be better for it.” As educators, we reassure our students that practical matters—this damned business of living—will be solved by serendipity. We ask our students to share Micawber’s faith, that some time, somewhere, somehow, something will turn up. Our students, however, know that David Copperfield is fiction; Micawber did time in debtor’s prison.

The evidence against the belief in serendipity as an outcome of a liberal arts education is all around us. If the belief were accurate, staffing courses with adjuncts would be difficult, for our underpaid and overworked colleagues with liberal arts skills would have been absorbed into the greater economy long ago. It’s worth also noting that few academics who are advising youth to engage the liberal arts are confident enough of serendipity to dedicate their pension contributions to lottery tickets. Luck is not a career plan, and while reading and thinking have their pleasures, persuading students who enroll in hope of a better life that the better life is the life of the mind morally requires a warning label. You may eventually need to borrow thousands of additional dollars to fund your post-graduate education for a paying vocation. Liberal arts academic advisors often ask the one-size-fits-all career plan question: “Have you thought about law school?”

The hope for on-the-job training offered to a bright, young people in what used to be called the “executive track” has not existed for twenty years. Business is what it is—effort for profit. The hope that a post-graduate education is something that will be supplied free by the private sector is delusional. The shrinking employment sections of newspapers carry no notices for generalists. What sounds more lame than an application letter that ends with, “I learn quickly”? When ten percent unemployment plagues our state, our students know this; so do their parents; so does the legislature. Educators who pass their responsibility to educate to employers encourage exploitation, underemployment, and undermine the greater social good.

At their worst, educators in the Traditionalist Camp who proselytize the liberal arts engage in class warfare. When students borrow vast sums and work crushing hours at meager wages to pursue a dream, where financial aid is neither plentiful nor adequate, encouraging students to invest time, money and effort in a traditional liberal arts education is to ensure their poverty. It is also bad educational practice: After waiting on tables for thirty hours each week or standing on one’s feet clerking in retail stores, contemplating “big ideas” is numbing. Shall we erect signs? Welcome to the Liberal Arts.  Only the wealthy need apply.

In the end, the Traditionalist case for the liberal arts is religious, an insistence that like the promise of Heaven, large but unforeseeable rewards await the liberal arts student after an education of virtue. Schools are churches, professors are priests, academic disciplines are mysteries, students are acolytes, and apostates are louts, if not worse. In the Traditionalist Church, diversity of thought is greeted with all the warmth the Puritans extended to Anne Hutchinson. Woe unto the humanities colleague who suggests a practical course of study! Though lip service for the efficacy of the liberal arts generates seductive copy for the College Catalog, fie upon the heretic who dares believe such stuff! Vocational training? Abomination! As with any priesthood, liberal arts academics encourage their brighter acolytes to join them, not quite acknowledging that professorship is a vocation itself, the outcome of very specialized training. Like being a taxi driver or a manicurist, being a professor calls for rigorous testing, the certificate being “the terminal degree.” Academics who finish their training but fail to find a position are cast into chronic under-employment as adjuncts. Plainly, for reasons that are mysterious and could not possibly be connected to value, our non-tenure track colleagues have not been granted Grace.

Fear not. God must love them, for He made so many!

The Practicality Camp

The Practicality Camp understands value only as transaction. The people who pay for education—trustees, students, legislators, parents—define education as an investment. Every investment must have the promise of a return, the sooner, the better. Charged with social engineering, legislators view higher education as a slot machine: You drop in a nickel and quarters fall out. Paradoxically, trustees and legislators want the slot machine to pay off every time, but without loading it with coins.

The Practicality Gang’s vision is short, often only as far as the end of the next fiscal year. Nimble realists know the short view is best: Why plan when conditions are sure to change? Yes, study trends, make predictions, and then act, but remain unperturbed by the frequency with which predictions prove wrong or people are abandoned in the wake of changing conditions. The occasional financial collapse is the salutary means by which fat is removed from budgets: Let no financial crisis be wasted. In a pinch, we can always make capital investments to create construction jobs now.

Senior managers in the Practicality Camp believe a liberal arts institution is a factory, a place where educated students are products, like aluminum pots stamped from a metal press. Time and motions studies are the key to efficient production. Twiddle a few settings, and the pots come out in required shapes and sizes. Ratios of personnel to graduates, to majors, persistence and time to graduation, the cost of credit delivery can be calculated—and then funds allocated so that a liberal arts education can have the desired economic and social relevance.

In the Practicality Camp the factory product—students—are also the customers, and the customer is always right. Students who believe higher education to be a retail outlet resent the assessment game, an exercise perpetrated by sadistic teachers who should, for decency’s sake, simply sell diplomas. It’s all about the degree, right?

It is easy to snicker, but in a time of economic contraction, the thought leaders of the Practicality Camp make a sound argument, especially when it comes to the expenditures of public monies. Legislators answer to voters, and it is awkward to explain how the Department of Advanced Widgetry should be funded at dear old State U.

Unfortunately, like French generals constructing the Maginot Line, administrators and legislators made antsy by citizens peering over their shoulders fight the last war. The harm to students is devastating. Give us software engineers! they cried a decade ago, and legislators opened the financial sluiceways, funds flowed, and soon there was a glut of unemployed software engineers whose best hope for employment was to relocate to Bangalore. Well, what does it matter? When schools are factories and students are products, those nimble legislators can always persuade their constituents to return to school to “retool” their skills.

Make no mistake, social engineering and central planning need the liberal arts and sciences, so long as the product produced—human capital—can join in the great effort to keep our region, state, and nation “on the right track.” It’s just too bad no one knows where the terminus might be.

The dirty little secret of higher education is that we are unable to imagine courses of study that do more than prepare students to work for someone else. And we have no idea what the next game-changing innovation might be.

So while in the Traditionalist Camp, they are sneering at how the Practicality bunch churns out unthinking drones, in the Practicality Camp, they are snickering at how the Traditionalist gang produces overeducated burger-flippers and baristas whose only hope for success is an appearance on Jeopardy!

The Third Camp

Is there a practical liberal arts education?

The world has changed, and both camps need to grasp the enormity of the changes. Neither a traditional liberal arts education nor an education in the arts and science directed at specific vocational outcomes has sufficient efficacy. Yet, the changes are all around us. For our students’ sakes, we can no longer ignore them. The dinosaurs that once dominated the biosphere did not evolve into mammals; they died before a new order could arise. The agency of doom was neither invisible nor secret. The sky flooded with the flaming light of an oncoming asteroid so brilliant it paled the sun. It struck, and nothing was ever the same again.

In the 1960s, visionary thinker Peter Drucker coined the phrase “knowledge worker.” In the mid-1980s—a generation ago!–the United States became a service economy, meaning more than half the GDP (Gross Domestic Product) was created by services (http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa093.html and http://www.allbusiness.com/manufacturing/computer-electronic-product-manufacturing/1182847-1.html). The manufacturing economy that began with the first Industrial Revolution is not coming back any time soon. In a service economy, information is a commodity, no different from the means of production Karl Marx identified: land, labor and capital. Access to information has become ubiquitous; apply critical thought to information, and you have knowledge.

Students can no longer be deemed repositories of knowledge and skills; they are managers of the knowledge to which we all have omnipresent access. Since knowledge workers identify, access, harvest, process, and disseminate information, an effective liberal arts education acknowledges and teaches the importance of those skills. A contemporary liberal arts education must be about knowledge management.

Both camps cry together: JARGON!

Well, yes and no. Today’s jargon becomes tomorrow’s standardized speech, and what self-respecting deconstructing semanticist studying the semiotics of psychosexual socio-anthropology would claim that the liberal arts are free of jargon? We may deem such terms the technical terminology of a profession, but five feet across Lafayette Avenue no one cares. They have, however, noticed that the stuff those professors are teaching seems somewhat disconnected from the skills and knowledge that the best and the brightest need in the 21st century.

Though claims about the pervasive influence of the Internet seem like hyperbole, they are not. Reflexive denial comes from both camps because both stare uncomprehending at a very bright falling asteroids and hope by denial the asteroid will go away.  It will not; not even taking shelter in a cave will stop the future.

There are profound differences among data, information, and knowledge, too many to explore here, but suffice it to say that knowledge requires the conjunction of at least two bits of information, and information is based on data. ( Glasser, P. “The Knowledge Factor,” CIO Magazine, pp. 108 – 118. Dec 15 1998). For example, the number of students admitted to Salem State College in a year is a datum; the ratio of women to men is two data, and is therefore information; critical thinking applied to information results in knowledge, perhaps an estimate of how many residence hall rooms will be allocated by gender or how many RAs will be need to be hired. Note how the creation of “knowledge” is a human function, applied critical thinking, drawing conclusions from information based on data.

Can a liberal arts education teach knowledge management?

Both camps will need to abandon some treasured self-serving notions.

Students are repositories of facts. Knowledge workers are not repositories of information; they are critical thinkers who access information and work with it before communicating new knowledge. They do not hoard knowledge under the mistaken notion that knowledge is power. Hoarded knowledge leads to isolation and irrelevance; real power arises from connectivity. The value-add of a knowledge worker is thought or redesign of how information is delivered. Loading student heads with facts is a waste of time; billions of pages of information fit in a palm on the screen of a $300 smart phone. In the Knowledge Management School of Liberal Arts, access to information is ubiquitous and instant.

Only certified intelligence constitutes expertise. This is historically a bizarre and recent proposition, one propagated by professors guarding the mysteries. “Amateur” in its original meaning meant one who loves a subject, and such amateurs as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson would have been puzzled by 21st-century institutions building intellectual silos around political science, architecture, engineering, and literature. In the Knowledge Management School of Liberal Arts, expertise belongs to those who harvest it, not those with parchment on the wall.

Each academic discipline has a specialized rhetoric; to accomplish Widgetry, one must learn the tropes of Widget Discourse. Uhhhhh… only if the only people who see, read, view, or listen to the knowledge created by a knowledge worker are other Widgeteers. The insistence on specialized “styles,” for example—MLA, APA, CMS, AP—does very little except to identify members of a guild to each other. In the Knowledge Management School of Liberal Arts, information is processed to democratize it, not guard it. If power arises from connectivity, then the knowledge needed to implement change must be available to all. Knowledge workers enable social and civic betterment. Why else do totalitarian regimes keep their citizens from the Internet? Networked knowledge workers are the remedy to snow jobs, propaganda, lying politicians, and totalitarian states.

Print is superior to electronic sources. Print is not now, nor has it ever been, infallible; in fact, an egregious misprint becomes “fact” forever. We waited for Galileo to correct the authority, Aristotle, who presumed that heavier objects fall faster. Phlogiston was once “fact”; so was the inferiority of women’s intellectual ability. Liberal arts students still require having their presumptions challenged by their teachers; identifying fact, theory, and opinion needs to be taught, no matter what medium carries the information. In the Knowledge Management School of Liberal Arts, critical thinking is the paramount skill for leadership.

The Internet is a swamp of error. Online, errors of fact are challenged and corrected at the speed of light. A misprinted book in the library stays misprinted forever. Blanket condemnations of Wikipedia are distressingly similar to Chinese bureaucrats censoring Google searches with the words Dalai Lama, Tibet, and Tiananmen Square. Information needs to be free, and students from the Knowledge Management School of Liberal Arts will be a power for freedom the world over.

Students are better “at” the Internet, so teaching them about how to identify, access, harvest, process, and disseminate knowledge is a waste of time since they already know it. This self-serving claim that releases teachers from all but lip service to “life-long learning” is false. The claim cannot sustain critical thought; it is akin to believing that because one knows how to turn on a television, one is naturally capable of producing TV news. In the Knowledge Management School of Liberal Arts, lifelong learning is a reality, and is required of mentors as well as students.

Accessing information on the Internet is about mastering software. Again, this self-serving claim that relieves faculty from learning new skills does not bear scrutiny. Teaching software is fruitless. A consequence of Moore’s Law—which was proposed in 1965, nearly a half century ago, was modified in 1975, and still seems to hold today— is that technological changes in 24 months are so substantial that software will necessarily change to reflect those advances. To argue that teaching Internet access is a trade education about simple electronic tricks is akin to claiming that if an apprentice carpenter has been shown the uses of a hammer, the master carpenter needs to know nothing about the uses of a saw, plane, lathe, or any other tool needed for cabinetry—being young, the apprentice will figure it out. In the Knowledge Management School of Liberal Arts, faculty are themselves always growing as knowledge workers. The liberal arts have always taught students to access, identify, harvest, process, and disseminate information. What have changed are the mechanisms and speed by which access to information can be accomplished, what constitutes information, how information is collected, the means by which information can be processed, and the mechanisms through which information can be disseminated—whether read, viewed or listened to.

Can a curriculum be constructed around these principles, or will we continue to throw pebbles over silo walls while the asteroid falls? Evolve or die; there is no other option.

CONTRIBUTOR’S NOTE
During his forty years as an educator, Perry Glasser took a near-decade hiatus to occupy “a front-row seat at the revolution.” As an editor, columnist, manager, staff and freelance writer, he worked for business and technology b-b magazines. His prize-winning fiction and memoirs have appeared in numerous journals; his recent book, Dangerous Places (BkMk Press, University of Missouri, Kansas City, 2009) has been long-listed for the Frank O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. Perry coordinates the Professional Writing Program, a concentration and minor in English at Salem State.

This article is part of ASpect’s September 2010 issue on Liberal Arts.